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QIKIQTARJUAQ/BROUGHTON ISLAND - For the members of the Inuit Knowledge Project, the term "expert" defies conventional definition.

The Inuit Knowledge Project was established by Parks Canada in 2005 in an effort to incorporate traditional knowledge into the management of Nunavut's national parks, according to Micheline Manseau, an ecosystems scientist with the Nunavut Field Unit of Parks Canada and one of the primary investigators of the Inuit Knowledge Project.

"Knowledge is more than just research; knowledge is much broader than that," Manseau said. "There is a lot of knowledge that is retained by the people."

Four Inuit knowledge working groups have been established in communities near Nunavut's national parks.

Arctic Bay and Pond Inlet's groups are responsible for Sirmilik National Park; the group in Repulse Bay is responsible for Ukkusiksalik National Park, while community members from Pangnirtung and Qikiqtarjuaq form one group that shares responsibility for Auyuittuq National Park.

"The framework we put in place was to have working groups in each community for each park in order to make sure the work was going to be guided by knowledgeable people from the communities so it wasn't just us in the offices," Manseau said.

The groups assist Parks Canada with everything from training Parks Canada staff about travelling on the land to providing information to visitors.

The knowledge documented throughout the project has been invaluable, Manseau said. It has been used not only by Parks Canada, but university students have been using information from the project to complete their theses as well.

"One university student thesis was based on how traditional knowledge is defined by the younger generation; another thesis was about snow geese and foxes, based on traditional knowledge from Pond Inlet," Manseau said. "It all feeds into Parks Canada work."

Kataisee Attagutsiak, an assistant with the project, said Inuit from Qikiqtarjuaq and Pangnirtung feel their opinions about their land are now being taken into consideration.

"They said they felt they were never really part of the park until they created the Inuit Knowledge Working Group for the park," she said. "It gave a lot of the community members a voice for what they want to see and what they want to do alongside working as a team with Parks Canada."

The next step of the project will be to create podcasts, Manseau said. Interviews with elders and other members of the project will be broadcast on local radio stations and hopefully, classrooms will use them as well. The podcasts will also be available on the group's website, www.lecol-ck.ca.

"The plan for that is now we are working with the working group on some lessons learned from the project and we do have about nine scripts written," she said. "The working groups are working on them because they're going to be both in English and Inuktitut."

The podcasts will include observations from elders about environmental changes they have witnessed in their lifetimes, polar bear behaviour, and countless other topics.

"The idea is these podcasts, we can play them on the radio, in the schools. I thought they might be a little more accessible than text because you can hear people speaking during the interviews," Manseau said.

Manseau said she hopes the podcasts will be available sometime this winter.